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Why wasn’t it a big deal when Trump screwed up Ronny Jackson’s name or when he said Orban was the leader of Turkey.
I couldn’t bring myself to watch it but from what I am reading he did ok except for one gaffe which apparently people won’t let go of.
Yeah it was.
Trust me, I know snarky.
No need to be snarky.
It was an oversight on my part.
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/11/nx-s1-4914137/president-age-constitution
Our presidential candidates have never been older. You can thank the Founding Fathers
The U.S. Constitution requires a president to be 35 or older, but only a lower age limit exists. There has never been an upper one.
Over the past two weeks, President Biden has been pilloried from all sides for his performance during the recent CNN presidential debate, perceived by many as weak and halting. And as his subsequent public appearances have done little to slow calls for him to bow out of the presidential race, a question has been on many voters' minds: Is it possible to be too old to be president?
Biden and former President Donald Trump are the two oldest major-party candidates whom voters have ever encountered on their ballots. If Biden wins the election, he'll be 82 come Inauguration Day. Trump would be 78.
And while age and mental acuity have a complicated relationship, the candidates' ages have affected voters' perceptions of how well they'd be able to do their jobs.
That was the case even before the debate: Only 15% of voters were at least "very confident" that Biden had the physical fitness required to be president, and 21% felt similarly about his mental fitness, according to an April Pew Research Center report. (Trump fared better, with 36% expressing that level of confidence in his physical fitness and 38% in his mental ability.)
The Founding Fathers certainly thought about presidential age centuries ago: It's baked into Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which requires that, among other things, a president be at least 35 years old. But while there's a limit on how young one can be to assume the office, there has never been a rule about how old a president could be.
Today, nearly 80% of U.S. adults surveyed support having upper age limits for federal elected officials, including the president, according to Pew. But such a limit would have never occurred to the architects of the U.S. government in the 18th century, constitutional experts say, and there are huge barriers to those rules changing anytime soon.
Age was but a number at the Constitutional Convention
The 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia was full of intense debates that shaped the Constitution and are memorable even now. It's easy to assume that the age requirement was similarly the product of a lot of time and deliberation. But that wasn't necessarily the case. After all, the Founders were busy constructing an entire government from scratch, says Julian Davis Mortenson, a constitutional law professor at the University of Michigan.
"There was literally an infinite array of things they had to resolve," he says. Case in point: Should there be an executive branch in the first place? Would there be one single president or multiple leaders? And how would they be chosen?
"And there's only so much bandwidth even over the course of a four- or five-month drafting process. Some of the things they thought about, they thought about a lot. And some of the things just didn't really come up."
When the Founding Fathers settled on the idea of a single, powerful executive, it was clear that the role required someone trustworthy and capable enough to take up the mantle, Mortenson says.
So how to screen for that? The Founders came up with formal requirements that, in their minds, correlated with those qualities, says Buckner F. Melton Jr., a history professor at Middle Georgia State University. They'd have to be a resident of the U.S. for at least 14 years to ensure they were familiar with the laws and customs of the country, and they'd have to be a natural-born citizen to protect the presidency from outside influence.
A minimum age limit was put into place because "age was the best corollary they had for sound judgment, maturity and what we might refer to as wisdom," Melton says. And they picked 35 — slightly higher than the Senate requirement (30) and the House (25).
So if there was a floor, why wasn't there a ceiling? According to all the convention documentation, the idea wasn't floated at all, Melton says. He has a theory as to why: Life spans were much shorter back in that part of the 18th century, so the idea that someone could be in political office at an age when they might not be at their peak mental fitness probably did not occur to the Founders.
Presidential age and mental capacity became increasingly relevant
As time went on, industrial-era medical advances like antibiotics and antiseptics meant that people tended to die later than they once did, Melton says. And as presidents started to live longer — and to have disabling medical emergencies — the question of capacity to serve started to emerge.
President Woodrow Wilson, who had a stroke in 1919 at age 63 that "seriously compromised" his ability to work, became emblematic of that concern, Melton says. For the next year and a half of his presidency, Wilson was mostly bedridden, and his wife, Edith Wilson, and doctors played a large role in helping him with his presidential duties — all while the public was mostly left in the dark. (The extent to which they were assisting him with his presidential duties is the subject of some debate. Although Edith Wilson said in her autobiography that she "never made a single decision regarding the disposition of public affairs," most historians agree she had a heavy hand in his decision-making.)
It became clear to those in Wilson's Cabinet that he wouldn't step aside from the role to let someone else, even his vice president, assume office, Mortenson says. And there wasn't much that anyone could do about it — after all, the Constitution mentioned what would happen when presidents died but not what would happen when their ability to serve became greatly diminished.
The question would continue to arise over the decades to come, particularly when President Franklin D. Roosevelt's health declined precipitously before he died in office in 1945, at age 63, and when President Dwight Eisenhower experienced a heart attack and other serious illnesses in the 1950s. But things reached a tipping point in 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn into office. There were concerns about the hardiness of the line of succession: At the time of the assassination, Johnson had experienced a near-fatal heart attack years earlier, and the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate were 71 and 86, respectively.
"Once you have experience with concrete, real-world events prompting worry about something like what happens when the president can't do his job, you get political responses," Mortenson says. The response this time: the 25th Amendment, ratified by the states and adopted in 1967.
Among other things, the 25th Amendment lays out how a vice president would take over for a president unable to perform official duties. It also specifies the process through which a president unable to fulfill duties could be removed from office by the vice president, a majority of the Cabinet and a supermajority of Congress.
The removal portion of the amendment has never been invoked — even though this had reportedly been considered by at least some of President Ronald Reagan's advisers during his second term due to his alleged declining mental state. (He announced his diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease in 1994, five years after he left the presidency. At the time, he was the oldest president to leave the Oval Office, at 77 years.) The matter was also raised in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection; Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Democrats from the House Judiciary Committee called for then-Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to strip Trump of his powers.
But this amendment is the closest we've come to politically addressing concerns about a president's age and mental faculties, Mortenson says.
What would it take to install a presidential age limit?
Even though polls show widespread support for age limits, the obstacles to changing the requirements for becoming the president are considerable. For a rule change to stand up in courts, the Constitution itself would need to be amended, Mortensen says.
The bar for passing an amendment is notoriously high — it needs to clear a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate, or two-thirds of the states can petition Congress to call a constitutional convention. From there, three-fourths of the country's state legislatures must ratify the amendment for it to become a part of the U.S. Constitution.
It seems unlikely that Congress would be amenable to making any changes to the presidential age requirement, Melton says, because serving as a representative or senator is often a stepping stone to the presidency.
"If Congress is going to be reluctant to impose age limits because they may see themselves as cutting themselves off from the White House by doing this, then a convention of the states will be the only way out," he says. "And Congress has shown in the past that it is perfectly willing to throw up roadblocks to that process."
It's not just a question of politics — it's also a matter of neuroscience. There's the most basic question: What would the limit be? There's not one set age at which a person's cognitive abilities decline, and some people don't decline much at all. Alternatively, others — including Reagan's daughter — have proposed using some kind of cognitive test as a gauge.
"We would need to have to come up with some sort of good, empirical, verifiable, reliable tests on which there's a really good, strong consensus to decide when someone would be too old," Melton says. "The other thing you could do, of course, is just go with a bright line and say, after age 70, that's it. We do that with retirements. Why not with the White House?"
Whatever the fix, voters seem to have come to a sort of consensus, he says. "While the country is horribly divided right now … there is a type of weird uniformity where everyone realizes, whatever your politics are, a presidential candidate can be too old."
The decision should be taken out of future politicians hands.
There has to be stricter age requirements for all future candidates and SC justices.
We got burned when RBG wouldn’t step down and now it may happen again with Biden.
Back when they had the big fundraiser and FOX showed the video where it looked like Biden was lost and Obama was helping him off the stage, they tried to cover it up but sadly it looked real to me.
Today Clooney said that the Biden that was at the fundraiser was the same Biden that was at the debate.
It doesn’t help that Biden announced that he would be scheduling fewer events for after 8 pm.
The MSM is not going to let this go and it will keep showing cracks in the Democratic Party.
I will vote for whoever the candidate is but I really do wish the story will end and the MSM can remind people that Trump is a liar and convicted felon.
NEW: President Joe Biden himself called into the @HoustonChron today saying he's been trying to “track down” the governor to get the necessary requests to release the federal aid, which includes manpower and supplies.
— Jeremy Wallace (@JeremySWallace) July 9, 2024
Abbott of course has been in Asia. https://t.co/relqQZ4SBj
Yikes!
Yikes!
Only the best people. Party of family values.
BREAKING: remember the Trump appointed judge that resigned in Alaska? Here’s what he did: created a hostile work environment, sexually assaulted a law clerk, and lied about it to investigators. The full report comes with a trigger warning. My go. https://t.co/HLIKMKTnaP pic.twitter.com/6S8suwYWnE
— Mueller, She Wrote (@MuellerSheWrote) July 9, 2024
The average age of the signers of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776 was 44 years old, but more than a dozen were 35 or younger:
— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) July 8, 2024
Abraham Lincoln: 33
Dwight Eisenhower: 39
Mr. T: 25
Timothée Chalamet: 21
Peter Parker: 18
Brittney Spears: 20
The Count from Sesame…
BREAKING: Stephen Colbert just demolished main stream media for their hypocrisy in how they are covering President Biden’s every word and completely ignoring anything Donald Trump says. Retweet so every American knows main stream media has lost its way. pic.twitter.com/ZkLa1vzbha
— Kamala’s Wins (@harris_wins) July 7, 2024
Democrats are their own worst enemies. The fighting on Twitter is ridiculous with people blocking each other because they disagree about what Biden should do. This reminds me of all the Bernie supporters who refused to vote for Hilary and voted for Jill Stein instead.
Although they are acting like a cult, the Republicans are sticking together behind Trump for the most part.
If Biden withdraws, how about a ticket of Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney to show this election is about our democracy? Country over party.
— Andrew Weissmann (weissmann11 on Threads/Insta)🌻 (@AWeissmann_) July 5, 2024
They have to win the House and Senate first, no?
I don’t doubt they would do it either.
Dems talk a lot, but unfortunately they don’t act a lot.
Did you see Kimberly Atkins Stohr on Deadline White House today? She was on fire!
5?
Who is he replacing?
The problem with the DNC is that they don’t think or plan.
Even before the debate, because of Biden‘s age, they should have had a plan.
Top Campaign Official ...
WITHDRAWAL FROM RACE 'ONLY A MATTER OF TIME'
EXCLUSIVE
7/3/2024 8:12 AM PT
Joe Biden has been steadfast up to this point -- he's in the 2024 race to stay, but that's not the way top officials in his campaign are feeling.
TMZ has learned one top campaign official is privately telling at least one mega-donor ... "It's only a matter of time" before Biden bows out.
We're told the official is saying the focus has now shifted from singular support for a Biden re-election to, "Democrats have to retain The White House." In other words, it's no longer all about Biden.
The official says Biden still needs time to process the panic within his party, and some of that involves understanding polling trends. But, the official concedes, "There's little hope the polls are going to improve."
We're also told no one in the campaign has, up to last week, "considered a Plan B," but now everyone's scrambling.
And, we're told, the official thinks the likely person to step in if Biden withdraws is Kamala Harris, and part of it is "a money thing." The money Biden raised is earmarked for the Biden/Harris campaign, and there's a serious question if that money would be available to another candidate.
https://www.tmz.com/2024/07/03/joe-biden-withdrawing-campaign-official-kamala-harris-money/
I feel so much better!
This week has done me in.
You will have to keep giving me pep talks.
You know about Rockland Bakery?
Love to get the rolls and bagels fresh out of the oven!
The question remains….who decides if it is an official action. If all cases end up in the Supreme Court, Biden would lose but Trump would win.
The new powers are only for Trump
It’s hard not to give up hope
I am at a Town Hall by Mike Lawler. What should I ask him?
RUDY GIULIANI
DISBARRED IN NY OVER 2020 ELECTION SHENANIGANS
https://www.tmz.com/2024/07/02/rudy-giuliani-disbarred-election-fraud/
Taraji P. Henson made Project 2025 the talk of the BET Awards
The host of this year's BET Awards warned viewers on multiple occasions about the far-right plan to dismantle and remake the government in Trump's image.
July 1, 2024, 2:52 PM EDT
By Ja'han Jones
Project 2025, the draconian plan supported by conservative groups to dismantle the government if Donald Trump is elected in November, was the talk of the Black Entertainment Television Awards on Sunday.
The plan, which includes everything from rolling back civil rights legislation to restricting contraception and abortion access, would effectively place the United States under authoritarian Christian nationalist rule and purge people from the government if they’re seen as disloyal to Trump. And despite all its horrors, recent reports suggest many people still don’t know about the plan.
So it was noteworthy that Project 2025 and its role in the conservative movement’s plans to unravel civil rights protections received ample attention Sunday.
Host Taraji P. Henson made multiple references to it. One came at the show's end when she encouraged viewers to research it, and another came during a midshow public service announcement.
She said:
Show up and show out when it’s time to vote, because it’s not just about the presidential election, you guys. It’s time for us to play chess, not checkers. It’s about making decisions that will affect us as human beings. Our careers, our next generations to come. Did you know that it is now a crime to be homeless? Pay attention. It’s not a secret: Look it up. They are attacking our most vulnerable citizens. The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up!
Henson went on to reference Project 2025's proposals to require mandatory national service, which could include compulsory military service and has many people concerned about the reinstitution of the draft. She also talked about the potential for the next president to seat three Supreme Court justices.
"We need those seats, or we have no protection," she warned.
During the show, she appeared in an ad with Vice President Kamala Harris, in which the two Howard University alums discussed the election and the civil rights at stake. The ad didn't explicitly mention Project 2025, but it did address the democratic principles — like bodily autonomy and voting rights — threatened by it. These kinds of messages struck me as significant.
I’ve written at length about celebrities and pop culture figures using their platforms to promote Trump and his fascistic MAGA movement. It was promising to see the BET Awards effectively used to do the opposite — at least when Henson was onstage.
Henson's messaging — and more like it — may go a long way in closing the existing information gap for many voters and Project 2025. Her words rang especially true Monday, when the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Trump's federal election interference case deeming presidents partially immune from prosecution over a wide range of actions. If Trump is elected and Project 2025 is put into action under these terms, Americans will all be living under an imperial presidency — authoritarian rule with no guaranteed end.
https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/bet-awards-taraji-henson-project-2025-rcna159770
In my almost 70 years on the earth I never thought I would say this but I am starting to hate this freaking country
So true!
Well, yeah. But that was before we let the Black guy be POTUS.
— Angry Staffer 🌻 (@Angry_Staffer) July 1, 2024
Alito has never recovered from that. https://t.co/bIMpbWyU7p
SCOTUS: homeless people can’t sleep outside
— Angry Staffer 🌻 (@Angry_Staffer) July 1, 2024
SCOTUS: POTUS can’t forgive student debt
SCOTUS: women don’t have autonomy over their bodies
SCOTUS: EPA can’t regulate the water
SCOTUS: POTUS can assassinate his political opponent#AbortTheCourt
One of the differences between the Republican Party and their pundits and the Democratic Party and their pundits is that the Republicans do not dwell on the negative.
Every time there is a negative story on Trump, which is pretty much once a week or more, it is ignored by the right wing pundits and the Party and it goes away.
When there is a negative story about Biden, the pearl clutching and hand wringing goes on for days, just to make sure that every single potential Biden voter hears about it.
Here is her take on the potential VP picks.
Opinion Trump’s unqualified VP faves might mean a Palin redux for the GOP
Front-runners Doug Burgum and J.D. Vance are both spectacularly unqualified.
By Jennifer Rubin
June 27, 2024 at 7:45 a.m. EDT
Felon and former president Donald Trump will choose a vice president within the next couple of weeks. (Perhaps he will make his announcement just before his July 11 sentencing hearing, to try to preempt the new cycle of coverage.) The two leading contenders — North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Sen. J.D. Vance (Ohio) — are so spectacularly unqualified that the comparison to Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate in 2008, is unavoidable. That was the last time the GOP presidential ticket had someone so manifestly inexperienced and wacky in the No. 2 spot.
Considering Trump’s age and deterioration, his No. 2, realistically, might have to step into the top job one day. That makes the selection much more than a D.C. parlor game. So who are these guys?
Like Mike Pence, Burgum — an White, older man without much charisma — would not upstage Trump. But make no mistake: Pence had national experience and foreign policy credentials. Burgum’s qualifications, to put it mildly, are not impressive. (He’s very rich, however, which is what impresses Trump.)
Burgum is serving his second term as governor of an overwhelmingly White state (83 percent identified as “White only” in the most recent census), ranked 47th in population. It has about 100,000 more than D.C. Its largest city, Fargo, has about 128,000 people. To be blunt, North Dakota looks nothing like America as a whole.
In keeping with the ultraconservatism of his state, Burgum signed a near-total abortion ban and an anti-critical race theory bill. In addition, “Mr. Burgum has signed into law, at least eight bills targeting transgender or gender-nonconforming people in recent months,” the New York Times reported. “That is more than almost any other state in what has been a record-breaking year for anti-transgender legislation.”
Unsurprisingly for an energy-rich state, Burgum is devoted to the oil and gas industry. But he is also obsessed with the border — the Southern border, which is more than 1,700 miles from his state. Accordingly, he has deployed the state’s National Guard to offer “support” to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
In short, hailing from a sparsely populated, largely rural state dependent on fossil fuels, he has no exposure to the lives and concerns of vast numbers of Americans and no familiarity with the plethora of issues that would land on his desk should he have to take over for Trump. While richer and better educated, Burgum would be very much in the Palin tradition, absent the lively personality.
By comparison, Vance makes Burgum seem like a solid choice. In only his second year in any political office, Vance has not a single significant accomplishment in public life. Worse, he might be the most egregiously dishonest MAGA figure on Trump’s short list. His willingness to embrace MAGA conspiracies and peddle dangerous schemes might be what endears him to Trump. (On the downside for Republicans, Vance, who at 39 years old is half Trump’s age, might accentuate just how elderly Trump is.)
Whether carrying water for Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding the war in Ukraine, or minimizing the loathsomeness of antisemite Nick Fuentes, or embracing the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen, or insisting that Trump deserves absolute immunity, Vance gives pandering a bad name. He has expressly stated that, unlike Pence, he would have thrown the election to Trump in 2020. It’s rare that a vice-presidential candidate so clearly renounces in advance the oath he would take.
Vance’s track record in the culture wars includes “a measure to criminalize gender-affirming care for trans kids, a bill to ban federal mask mandates, a proposal to crack down on affirmative action policies at colleges and universities, and public support for a 15-week abortion ban with exceptions for rape, incest and threats to the life of the mother,” Politico reported.
Vance’s authoritarian streak — which has extended to demanding an investigation of Post contributor Robert Kagan and supporting plans to “summarily fire a significant number of midlevel federal bureaucrats” and “openly defy” the Supreme Court — should frighten any sentient American. If you add in the senator’s bizarre animus toward U.S. global leadership (Vance is “deeply skeptical of the so-called ‘rules-based international order’ — the system of laws, norms and multilateral institutions established in the years following the Second World War,” the Politico story notes), he emerges as an especially dangerous character.
No one should doubt that a Democratic vice-presidential nominee with a similar background and dearth of experience would be excoriated as unfit and unserious, evidence of the presidential nominee’s rotten judgment. If Trump picks one of these spectacular underachievers, he should be pressed to justify naming them; he will own any gaffes that ensue. If voters needed any further evidence of Republicans’ lack of governing sobriety, a Burgum or Vance pick would provide it.
Perhaps Trump will choose neither, preferring to diversify the ticket either with the most cringeworthy Republican sycophant, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — notwithstanding the constitutional problem — or Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), the darling of more “serious” conservatives before he became another Trump toady. Either of those three-term senators, at least, would represent a plausible vice president. Certainly, neither Burgum or Vance do.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/27/trump-vp-picks-palin/
I have a better idea. Trump needs to go to the beach for the holiday and get eaten by a shark!
It was a catastrophic performance by Biden but he still is not a convicted felon, pathological liar, or a narcissist.
Unfortunately or maybe fortunately we won’t have to watch another debate because there is no way Trump will do another one.
He is speaking at a watch party now and is voice sounds stronger. Is this the same guy from an hour ago?
This has been a disaster for Biden.
Nope, T will not mention Hunter.
Two mentions of Hunter so far